by Lori Smith
Late in the afternoon I walked through Sydney Gardens and right by 4 Sydney Place, where the Austens first lived on coming here.14 Sydney Place seems luxurious, as does most of Bath to me, but I was too tired to do more than venture into the edge of the park. Alas, there are none of the public breakfasts in Sydney Gardens that there were when Jane lived here, at least not this week. I expected there to be more entertainment in Bath—fireworks or concerts in the gardens. I've not found any outdoor entertainment (perhaps because of the rain) and nothing in the Assembly Rooms either. And nothing is free.
I sat on a bench eating fast food, watching a family play Frisbee, feeling very alone.
Saturday night I plan to go to the theater. They say I should be able to get a half-price ticket for ten pounds beforehand. They also say it's okay to wear jeans.
Sadly, I am unable to take a bath in Bath as my en suite has only a lovely tiny shower. One may visit the Baths, one may purchase all sorts of soaps and salts and gels, but one may not actually bathe.
Am completely and utterly distracted with thoughts of Jack. Afraid I've begun to think of him entirely as my own. Can barely read Persuasion. I'm too distracted with my own story—at times edging on panic, but mostly blissfully happy, ready to laugh for no real reason— like Anne, with “exquisite, though agitated sensations…, disposed.…to be courteous and kind to all, and to pity every one, as being less happy than” myself.15
At times I have been more in dread and fear than anything else— that something should happen so quickly and surely, that my life could change so suddenly. Here I am jumping to conclusions again. I am afraid of either possibility, if it works out as it seems destined to or if it falls apart. I am entirely comfortable when I'm with him; why I should be uncomfortable apart from him I don't understand. He's given me no reason to be comfortable though.
I think we are incredibly, unbelievably blessed. To be in love with someone you believe in, whom you respect and who respects you back, with whom you share all basic values, who welcomes your intelligence, who shares your laughter. To have it be a sure thing, not something that is strong enough to convince you to hold on to it and weak enough to keep you from commitment, not caught in that horrible middle ground. If my experience bears out what my heart perceives, I expect to be able to love him quickly and without reserve.
Perhaps I am foolish to think that experience will fall in line with what I have imagined over the last two weeks. I had one week to get to know him and conclude that he was my ideal; he will have months to disappoint. (It may not take months to disappoint; a week will be sufficient if I don't hear from him.) I'm certain if he knew how much I think of him now he would be horrified. He's been in Jordan. I've been traipsing around England following Jane Austen and reading her novels. Argh! Try falling in love and then taking weeks to delve into Austen with the prescription that you really ought not to think about the guy you're in love with.
I really need to be more like Elinor, but Elinor had a reason to put all her hopes aside. She had Lucy; she knew for certain Edward was unavailable. I'm sure with that kind of certainty I could be brokenhearted and steely and move on. But I have no devastating certainty— only a girl in North Carolina he may or may not be dating.
I don't have to know any of this now, any of the things my heart seems to be certain about. I can just relax and enjoy right where we are, which is just a beginning, and see where things go. I expect things to go swimmingly. I expect to laugh. I expect to have great conversations. I expect him to be kind and gentle. I expect my family to love him and my mother to be giddy and everyone else to wholeheartedly approve.
I will be home in ten days, and my time here is too valuable to be consumed thinking only about him. One way or the other, when I get home something will happen—or not happen—and I will have my answer.
I think about Jane meeting someone at the coast, finding him a match, Cassandra expecting him to be successful, Jane waiting to hear from him and only getting notice of his death. Jack flew home today, and I prayed for his safety. I can't imagine if that were the end of it all. I can't imagine what Jane felt.
I have been tired all day, and now that it is ten minutes after eleven, I don't know that I will be able to sleep. This waiting is a tender kind of torture. This bed is too big and gorgeous to be achingly empty.
Seventeen
The Bath Bun
Remember that we are English,
that we are Christians.
—HENRY TILNEY, NCRTHANGER ABBEY
From the top of Beechen Cliff, the whole city of Bath is a beautiful crowd of Bath Stone buildings in a neat jumble below, from Camden Place at the top, to the abbey in the middle and all the way down to the river. I hiked the nearly deserted path, covered over by trees, past town houses whose backyard gardens have the most amazing views. The climb was torturous but worth it. Sweet Catherine Morland hikes Beechen Cliff with Henry and Eleanor Tilney in Northanger Abbey while Henry lectures her on the picturesque, so that when she gets to the top, no longer trusting her own ideas of beauty, she “voluntarily reject[s] the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.”1
Northanger Abbey is so much fun, but I think fewer people read it, which is a shame. Its a satire of the gothic romances of the time, all the skeletons and villains and crazy women wrongfully locked away for years on end. Catherine's trip to Bath is her first entrée into the world, and she is too good-hearted herself to fully understand anyone's real character, full of seventeen-year-old naive enthusiasm and imagination, so she gets into a few scrapes. When she goes home with her new friends the Tilneys—who are gracious and kind, except for their father—she is enthralled with their home, the old abbey (though it is not nearly dark or dirty enough for her gothic tastes), and imagines herself into all kinds of ridiculous situations. The worst is when she goes to look for their dead mother, whom she thinks may be still alive and kept shut away by the colonel in a bedroom in the old part of the house or perhaps was horribly murdered by him when the children were all away. She is found out there by Henry, and as it turns out, the colonel is actually mean-hearted, not enough to kill his wife, but enough to cruelly send Catherine away alone when he realizes she's not so rich as he was led to believe.
Of course, Catherine eventually marries Henry Tilney. I think this is Jane's most realistic match. Henry doesn't have any violent romantic emotions, though he is “sincerely attached to her” and “truly love[s] her society.” Jane says “his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.”2 Not a grand love, but a steady one.
I hike back down to the center of town and the Bath Bun Tea Room for cream tea and Persuasion. It finishes so beautifully here. Anne gets a glow back in her complexion and her spirit. The Musgroves come to stay at the White Hart (which was a real inn, across a little promenade from the Baths), and Mary is actually thrilled to be in Bath, verging on happiness. Mrs. Russell is there, but Anne is now stronger, able to counter her sometimes mistaken advice. The Admiral and Mrs. Croft are delighted to be in Bath and to see Anne, and you begin to feel that she actually does have friends in the world. And then Captain Wentworth realizes that he's been proud and a little ridiculous, that he has wasted years by not coming back to Anne sooner, by not asking her to marry him again after he had established himself with more of an income. His pride was hurt, so he determined never to come back. Only he finds that impossible once he has a hint of Anne's feelings from that wonderful conversation with Captain Harville while Captain Wentworth sat nearby writing a letter. “We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us,” Anne says. “It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.”3 And then Wentworth cannot stand it any longer and pours out his heart, and everything is sealed on a quiet walk on the gravel path behind the Circus. I would like to find that gravel path.
I'm afraid my own failures, like Anne's, have
been more of personality rather than morality. Not that that's something to entirely brag about. Perhaps I have not been brave enough to sin, and maybe that is not entirely a moral victory.4
I've been consumed with my own failures—fashion and otherwise—over the last few years. I don't know why. Sometimes when I can't sleep, they run over and over through my mind, and there are enough of them to go on and on in that state. Sometimes I just fester on one of them for an hour, so consumed with its immensity that thoughts of any others are just reminders that there are other cavernous pits in my memory. My father says I worry about everything, but he doesn't really know the half of it.
I was born compliant, wanting to make other people happy, like Catherine unsure that my own views of the world were worth expressing. I wasn't always strong enough to go after what I wanted. I made decisions to please my parents, or because it was what was generally expected of me, or because it was easy. I was too insecure to hear any kind of criticism without it making me hurt and angry, but on the other hand I think there has always been a constant critic in my head. I have generally not been brave. I am now, I think, but I wasn't always. I feel like it took me longer than average to grow up. I think I'm not alone in feeling that way. There were parts of my life that were not fully lived because I was timid and afraid. (And, of course, a bit of a nerd. I will always be a bit of a nerd in the best possible sense.)
But today is not a day for feeling failure. Today I'm brave and full of peace. If anything, at the moment I'm startled by loving life. I'm daring now (at least a little), and I get to live my dream, to be a writer. (People ask me, “What do you do?” And I say, “I'm a writer,” and still it surprises me.) My life is full of possibility, and when I get home, however things work out with Jack doesn't really seem to matter. Not today.
So, like Catherine, I have nothing to do but “forgive [myself] and be happier than ever.”5
I've made a mess with my tea and I am wet, but I couldn't care less. I'm back at the Bath Bun, this time with cream tea and Emma,sitting outside under a big blue umbrella. It's so quiet and nice here in the soft rain. This is my favorite spot in Bath.
I worked up the strength to walk uptown to St. Swithin's, the small church where Mr. and Mrs. Austen were married and where Mr. Austen is buried, as well as Jane's grandfather, her mother's father. It was locked, so I couldn't get in, but peering through the iron gate in the cold rain, I could see Mr. Austens memorial stone in the churchyard. Fanny Burneys memorial is there too, author of Camilla and Cecilia and Evelina,books Jane loved.
If Jane didn't love Bath already, her father's death gave her less reason still to like it. He died on January 21, 1805, at the age of seventy-three.6 (Her dear friend Anne Lefroy had died just a month earlier in a riding accident.7) Jane wrote to her brother Frank on the HMS Leopard to let him know about their father's death and unfortunately had to write to break the news to him two separate times because she had some misinformation about the ship's location. George Austen fell ill on Saturday, with “an oppression in the head with fever, violent tremu-lousness, & the greatest degree of Feebleness.” Sunday he seemed much recovered, but that afternoon he took a turn for the worse, and by Monday, Dr. Gibbs was declaring that “nothing but a Miracle could save him.”8 That morning her father passed away.
Jane writes of “this virtuous & happy life,” and says, “The loss of such a Parent must be felt, or we should be Brutes—”9 And then in her next letter: “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?”10
George Austen was faithful and full of good humor and an excellent father. He loved his family, cared for his children, worked hard at being rector of a country parish. He seems to have had a genuine faith and no doubt worked to instill this in all of his children. We know that Jane copied out sermons for him from time to time.11 I think she was not the type to simply write things out without commenting on them, particularly if she disagreed, so you can imagine that they may have discussed theological issues as well. And while it wasn't the style then to educate daughters much, the girls had access to their father's extensive library, and the family was always reading to one another in the evening. The man who spent years teaching ancient Greek and Latin was not above loving lowbrow novels. He was the kind of father who worked to get his sons’ advancement in the navy and reminded Frank when he left home at fourteen of the importance not only of prayer but of cleaning one's teeth in a letter Frank cherished all his life, which was found “water-stained…and frayed by constant reading” after Franks death at ninety-one.12 And her father was the first to attempt to publish one of Jane's books, convinced that First Impressions was good enough for a wider audience than just the family.
No doubt Jane got many of her ideas about being a country clergyman from her father. It was a time in which church positions were traded almost like stock in a business. They often went to the highest bidder, who would hire someone for as little as possible to actually show up and do the church services. Mr. Austen believed contrarily that a country rector was really no good unless he lived among his people, that there was much good to be done just living out love on a day-to-day basis, setting an example of faithfulness. Edmund gives voice to all of these opinions in Mansfield Park,concluding that “as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.”13
The faith of the Austens was in many ways unusual, for it was an age in which being English meant being Christian, and being Christian often meant no more than being English. At the other extreme, there was the new Methodist movement, sincere in their faith and sometimes very severe. Had Jane been at either end of this spectrum, her writing would not be what it is. Had she been in a Methodist family, she may have been too serious to enjoy the frivolity of plays and novels. She ended up being very faithful, with a great deal of common sense (not to impugn the Methodists, of course) and an appreciation for humor and joy. I think in many ways she owed that to her father.
Necessarily, as children and parents, our perspectives on each other are slightly skewed. In some ways we see each other better than anyone else because we have the closeness of everyday life in which to observe every fault and every goodness, but the faults are more apparent somehow. In some ways, we get into patterns of thinking about each other, and it's hard to get out of those ruts and see each other as we really are. There is always an undercurrent, which we try to read and interpret and sometimes ignore—all these exhausting perceptions.
I've always been thankful for my particular parents, though I feel like now that they are in their early sixties I'm only beginning to understand their worth.
My father is a country rector of sorts. After retiring from the air force, he went to work full time for our church, an independent Bible church in the D.C. suburbs. And he has just retired from that to actually retire. He is wise and incredibly kind, and the years have brought out a great gentleness in him, or maybe it was there and I never saw it before.
My mom and I have always connected—for good or bad, but mostly for good—on an emotional level, easily and naturally. My father and I are so different that it took me longer to understand his perfections. Getting to have a closer relationship with him now is one of the joys of my life.
There is one aspect to Emma that always bothers me. It is the two days she spends in agony wondering about how Knightley feels after she realizes that she has always loved him and cant stand the thought of his marrying Harriet, if indeed he could be contemplating that. It's not what Emma feels, or how those feelings are described; it's that she has to wait only two days to find out that Knightley loves her equally in return. Once again, Emma gets exactly what she wants, with little difficulty (which I think is just the thing Jane thought no one would like about her). It's not that I don't like Emma. But I don't feel much pity for her seeing how everything was so quickly resolved.
Relationships in Jane's day happened so much faster. Mr. Collins proposed to Lizzy in little more than a week (and then, of course, to Charlotte Lucas ju
st a few days later). Knightley and Emma went from being friends to being engaged in the space of five minutes. Marianne and Willoughby were the closest to dating, hanging out together inseparably, but even he was ready to propose within two months at the most. This is an extreme I wouldn't want to go back to, nor would I want the kind of world in which Charlotte Lucas's accepting Mr. Collins makes any kind of sense whatsoever. But today we've gone to another extreme. We date for years, only to have (usually) the guy unable to make up his mind, unable to finally commit. I can kind of understand this when couples are living together and there's no real need for commitment, but within the church, without being too hard on the guys (because who wants to encourage someone into marriage who isn't ready for it?), I suppose I expect them to be more masculine, to prize marriage more, to be better able to commit.
So we have all these Christian couples going out for years and attempting not to have sex. Personally, I'm about ready to try one of the other extremes—to marry someone ridiculously fast or to just give up and move in with someone. I have no intention of doing that, of course, but I can't say it's not attractive.
I am exhausted (I'm always exhausted) and beginning to feel ready to go home. I don't want to leave Bath. My eyes are bloodshot. There are bags underneath them that I cannot cover up. I am dying to talk to someone close to me, and if anyone at the hotel or at church is too nice, I am likely to burst into tears. I don't have the energy to exert myself anymore, all of this traveling alone. My ankles hurt.
Why did I bring twelve pounds of books? They don't fit in my bags.
Just when I was in need of care, the sermon at St. Michael's was on 1 Peter 5:6-7: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”